Alf Young: Changes to how Scotland records its population really count when it comes to planning spending

HOW do you lose a population bigger than the entire city of Glasgow and then find it again, all in the space of five years? Very easily, it seems, if you are in the business of keeping tabs on births and deaths in Scotland, tracking migration in and out of the country and projecting how many of us might be living within Scotland’s borders in future.

Since the 1850s, successive Registrars General for Scotland have delivered their annual reviews of our demographic trends. Early holders of that office had to be legal men, advocates of ten years’ standing. The 17th holder of the post, Duncan Macniven, a history graduate, was a career civil servant. He recently retired.

In his first annual review, in July 2004, he created quite a stushie in the dry world of population statistics. He did it, not by looking to the past but by trying to predict what lay ahead of us. Mr Macniven suggested that, despite a small rise the previous year, Scotland’s population would fall below the iconic five million mark by 2009. On his projections back then it would continue to fall, reaching 4.84 million by 2027.

Politically, this was highly combustible stuff. Our population had been consistently above five million since the end of the Second World War. Was Scotland facing a 21st-century version of the clearances? One of the SNP’s leading thinkers, Jim Mather, took to calling the findings “Scotland’s population time-bomb”. Over the next few years that bomb was defused by emerging trends that rather confounded the registrar’s gloomy assessments.

The number of live births in Scotland started rising and then overtook the declining number of deaths. And net migration into Scotland, from the rest of the UK and from a wave of young economic migrants from the new accession states to the European Union, like Poland, continued to rewrite the old story of more people leaving our shores than wanting to come and live here.

The Registrar General’s response to this emerging evidence of a turning point in Scotland’s post-war population trends was curious. He resorted to a philosophy that can only be described as apocalypse postponed. In successive years, Mr Macniven insisted that, whatever the short-term boost to the numbers, Scotland would still see the day when that symbol of national decline – a population of less than five million – would become stark reality.

Having originally set doomsday for 2009, our date with destiny was serially revised upwards by Scotland’s official demographer-in-chief to 2017, then to 2036 and finally to 2076. He eventually saw sense and gave up trying to predict any such apocalypse altogether.

Five years on, with the rise in the birth rate persisting and net inward migration staying at relatively high levels, Mr Macniven changed his script entirely. He published, in October 2009, new projections of where he thought we were heading. Despite recession and the exceptional squeeze on living standards since, the key numbers from that 2009 revision remain unchanged in his valedictory report, released earlier this month.

Mr Macniven now expects Scotland’s population, far from slumping to 4.84m by 2027, to surpass its previous record high of 5.25m set in 1974 and go on rising, hitting 5.54m by 2033. That’s a whopping turnaround of 700,000 in what lies ahead – more than the population of Scotland’s biggest city, Glasgow (590,000).

As Mr Macniven put it in his first annual report “Population trends are hard to predict”. He wasn’t alone in persisting with the doomsday scenario. In 2005 Professor Robert Wright, then at the University of Stirling and author of Scotland’s Demographic Challenge, dismissed the rise in migration to Scotland from Eastern Europe as a “one-off blip”. The previous year, in a contribution to the Allander Series of pamphlets on charting a new way ahead for Scotland, Prof Wright included a chart showing Scotland’s population declining below five million in 2009 and below 4.5m by 2041. Jim Mather, then the SNP’s enterprise and economy spokesman and later a minister in the 2007 minority nationalist government, echoed Prof Wright’s assessment of the sustainability of the new migration from eastern Europe, calling it a “one-off surge as the result of EU enlargement in 2004”. The Registrar General’s report, he added, offered only “false optimism”.

Despite the gloom its spokesman has expressed in opposition, when the SNP did take power at Holyrood it set Scotland’s first population target as part of its economic strategy. That goal was to match the average growth in population of the 15 pre-enlargement states in the EU over the period 2007 to 2017.

At first Scottish population growth didn’t quite hit that target. In 2008 the EU 15 grew their combined populations by 0.60 per cent. Scotland managed a rise of 0.47 per cent. But by last year the Scottish population growth rate was comfortably exceeding its benchmark for the first time in decades. However, that trend was well under way long before Alex Salmond entered Bute House and a time when the SNP line was to dismiss early signs of improvement as illusory.

We will see, over the next two decades, whether the upbeat trends set out in Duncan Macniven’s farewell review prove any more robust than his gloom-laden initial offering. Who can say what the current turmoil in the eurozone will do to economic migration across the continent? Who can say what the absence of robust growth and a sustained squeeze on living standards here will do to the increasing propensity of women to have more babies?

Yet without some significant improvements in our understanding of what drives movements in population and in the quality of our demographic forecasting, how can anyone in government or the wider public realm plan credibly for future provision of everything from education to housing and the health service? Especially when there’s a population bigger than Glasgow’s as the margin for error.

The departed Registrar General notes in his final review that, when he arrived, “there was little research on Scotland’s population”. A modest start has been made on rectifying that. It’s a start, however, that could be compromised if the UK Statistics Authority decides, in 2014, to recommend a move away from another full Census in 2021 and big changes in the way the state gathers such information.

Meanwhile the General Register Office for Scotland, the arm of government over which Mr Macniven presided, has, since April, been merged with the National Archives for Scotland (NAS) to form the National Records of Scotland. The Keeper of the Records of Scotland, George MacKenzie, who ran the NAS will, from this month on, double up as Registrar General.

I know money is tight. But, given that hole bigger than Glasgow in recent efforts to chart and project our changing population, won’t the combined tasks of managing Scotland’s records and archives, registering births, deaths and marriages and promoting research into ancestry increasingly get in the way of doing as professional a job as can be done on where Scotland’s population is heading next?